Supermarket Chain to Face Child-Labor Case

By JANET BATTAILE,

Published: November 8, 1992

WASHINGTON, Nov. 7—
The Labor Department is preparing to bring one of the largest child-labor complaints ever against a supermarket chain, department officials said today.

The officials said the complaints would charge the Belgian-owned chain, Food Lion Inc., with allowing teen-agers to work around hazardous equipment, like meat slicers, and making teen-agers work longer hours than allowed under Federal child-labor laws.

A Labor Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said more than 1,400 complaints would be filed against the chain, of which 1,200 involved hazardous-working conditions. The official said that would make the case the largest ever brought against a single employer. The chain, which has its United States headquarters in Salisbury, N.C., has 60,000 employees in more than 1,000 stores in 14 states.

Food Lion's vice president for projects, Vincent G. Watkins, disputed the charges, saying the company was "the victim of a corporate campaign" by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. He accused the union of undertaking a two-year nationwide advertising campaign to enlist support for a complaint against Food Lion.

Union officials could not be reached for comment today.

Food Lion has not officially been notified of any charges, Mr. Watkins said. But he said Labor Department officials had "one informal conversation" with the company months ago in which the department said 90 percent of the violations relating to hazardous conditions involved workers under the age 18 "putting cardboard into nonoperating bailers."

"We obviously take all this very seriously," Mr. Watkins said. "We don't want to endanger any one of our teen-age workers."

The news of the expected labor case, which was first reported in The Washington Post today, comes on the heels of an ABC News "Prime Time Live" program on Thursday night that showed unsavory sanitation practices at two Food Lion stores. Food Lion's stock fell sharply on Friday.

The program included videotape that ABC said was shot by a producer who had obtained a job in one of the stores under false pretenses and videotaped her co-workers without their knowledge. The video showed employees in the meat department rewrapping old meat, poultry, ham and fish past the "sell-by" dates.

Food Lion sought to prevent the program from being broadcast. The company's president, Tom E. Smith, said the video was "faked," and Mr. Watkins said the company had obtained a judge's permission on Friday to view the evidence on which the program was based.

Mr. Watkins said that six of the seven employees interviewed were participants in a lawsuit against Food Lion and that ABC had "carefully selected the stores" it decided to videotape.

He added that Food Lion's sanitary conditions are on a par with its competitors.

"That's not our standard," he said of the unsanitary practices shown in the program. "If we had those conditions in all our stores across the country, we wouldn't be in business today."